Tableau 10.2 Delights with Advanced Analytics and More

Tableau 10.2 Delights with Advanced Analytics and More

Tableau Software just released Tableau 10.2. This delightful version upgrade is packed with a plethora of exciting advanced analytics capabilities, savvy mapping, more data connectors, enterprise management, API enhancements, and practical Section 508 accessibility functionality for government/public agency reporting that is lacking in other visualization platforms.

Tableau 10.2 release highlights include:

Python Integration New Python language integration enables advanced users and data scientists to call on Python scripts from within the Tableau calculation window using TabPy. Customers can use this functionality to develop advanced-analytics applications, and visualize their predictive models from Python in Tableau.

Integrated Covariance and Correlation This feature will help users better understand relationships in data.

Export to CSV This practical enhancement is sure to excite data crunchers that love to use multiple tools for analysis including Excel.

Better SAP BW Connectivity Tableau 10.2 provides fine-grained controls over guest access to help ensure governance, and also improves the connectivity with SAP BW with Single Sign-on support. Tableau can now support the security rules defined in SAP BW and ensure that users can only see the data that they are authorized to see.

Improved Data Prep This latest version now lets users union tables from a database and easily combine fields for joins leveraging database structure and schemas more efficiently. Tableau 10.2 can automatically recognize dates (there are more than 250 ways to represent a date) and make dates uniform with just one click, no scripting or complex calculations required. In addition, transforming data from a string to a date type is easier with Automatic DateParse.

Finer Formatting Controls Multiple measure legend options and formatting controls provide more clarity. Story points now have a variety of display options and caption boxes.

APIs and Extensibility Field specification in REST API, CORS and JSON support for JavaScript and web developers. New download of high-resolution images for your views on Tableau Server is a quite nice. Additional Extract API improvements in for spatial data types using WKT format. Document API improvements, Web Data Connector 2.2 and several sample projects were shared for customizing a portal and site to site migration. Lastly, Tableau Server Client now supports schedules, groups and does a better job of handling large downloads.

Section 508 Usability Tableau visualizations can now be made conformant to the current Web Content Accessibility Guidelines drafted by the Web Accessibility Initiative, commonly referenced as WCAG 2.0 AA. For government and public agency projects, this enhancement is key for delivering analytics to the general public.

As Tableau Software continues to expand and mature in the analytics space, it is also investing heavily in enterprise management initiatives and several key verticals.

Focus on IT/Enterprise Tableau touts enterprise deployments at companies like Boston Scientific, Deloitte, AmeriPride and VMware where strong partnerships between IT and the business are happening. They are investing in more resources to better equip IT to successfully evaluate and deploy analytics. A solutions page designed specifically for IT is at https://www.tableau.com/enterprise-IT.

Retail & Consumer Goods Tableau recently announced that 73% of the NRF Top 100 retailers use Tableau. They are seeing success with large deployments at companies like Redfin, GoPro, and PepsiCo. They also added best practices research, and new ways of exploring retail data including Six Trends in Retail Analytics for 2017 and Solutions Page for Retailers.

Jen Underwood is a Senior Director at DataRobot and founder of Impact Analytix, LLC. She has a unique blend of product management and “hands-on” experience in data warehousing, reporting, visualization, and advanced analytics. In addition to keeping a constant pulse on industry trends, she enjoys digging into oceans of data to solve complex problems with machine learning.
Over the past 20 years, Jen has held worldwide product management roles at Microsoft and served as a technical lead for system implementation firms. She has experience launching new products and turning around failed projects. Most recently she provided advisory, strategy, educational content development, and marketing services to 100+ technology vendors through her own firm. She has been mentioned by KD Nuggets, Information Management and Forbes for her work. She also has written for InformationWeek, O’Reilly Media, and numerous other tech industry publications.
Jen has a Bachelor of Business Administration – Marketing, Cum Laude from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and a post-graduate certificate in Computer Science – Data Mining from the University of California, San Diego. She was also honored to be a former IBM Analytics Insider, Tableau Zen Master, and Top 10 Women Influencer.